Developing apps for the Raspberry Pi that utilize the Xbox 360 Kinect is best accomplished with libfreenect. Libfreenect is an open-source library that provides access to the sensors and motors on the Kinect.

Raspbian’s apt repository has version 0.2 of libfreenect, which is quite old and seems to be missing a lot of the features that the latest code has. I’ve documented the steps for building the latest LibFreenect source code and dependencies, below (0.5.3 as of this post).